The Sons of Liberty had been planning the event for three weeks. They banned all bonfires except the ones they set, and they warned children, servants and the town’s two thousand slaves to stay off the streets. By Monday evening, prosperous men had paid up the bills of Boston’s debtors and cleared the jail. A local craftsman, Paul Revere, had engraved copperplates of a huge obelisk to rise beneath the Liberty Tree. It was lighted with two hundred and eighty lamps and inset with portraits of Rockingham, Pitt and other men who had spoken for the colonies. George III was also there, the only face shown in profile.
Hancock had ordered a stage for fireworks built in front of his house. At dusk, twelve rockets were set off near the workhouse and answered by a dozen from Hancock’s party. The volleys went back and forth, outdoing each other in star bursts and fiery wheels. Somehow, during the exchange, the obelisk caught fire and was destroyed.
Gentlemen and ladies passed from one open house to the next until, at 11 P.M., a horizontal wheel of fireworks sent sixteen dozen blazing serpents hurtling through the night air. That was the signal that the festival was over and the Sons of Liberty expected people to go quietly to bed.
Throughout the celebration, the Tories had been watching dourly. “Every dirty fellow just risen from his kennel,” one wrote afterward, “congratulated his neighbors on their glorious victory over England.” Samuel Adams had also viewed the scene skeptically. The people of Boston seemed maddened with a new loyalty to Britain and their king. They thought the battle was over.
—
Because of Samuel Adams, John Hancock had presided over a night of bonfires, secure that a mob wouldn’t attack his lavish house or his lovely gardens. Since Adams had defeated him for the House seat, Hancock had seemed to renounce politics. He had told friends that the Stamp Act would probably ruin him and yet the colonies must submit to it. But during the months of protest, Samuel Adams had drawn him into his circle of patriots, and soon Hancock was making lists of the dozen Boston Tories who, he joked, should be beheaded for supporting the use of stamps. As the town prepared for another election on May 6, 1766, some of Adams’ colleagues proposed backing a merchant named John Rowe for a House seat, but Adams turned his eyes toward Hancock’s house and asked, “Is there not another John that may do better?” The patriots took the hint and gave John Hancock the victory.
Hancock, who was not yet thirty, had inherited the largest fortune in New England, which helped to explain why, despite his modest accomplishments, he had joined Samuel Adams’ roster of exceptional young men. At the time of his birth in North Braintree, John’s prospects had been less brilliant. His father and grandfather were clergymen, but that guaranteed them only respect, not riches. At the age of seven, John himself seemed destined for the clergy, until his father died, leaving a widow and three small children. John’s merchant uncle, the very successful Thomas Hancock, and his stout, kindly wife, Lydia, were childless, and they took the thin and frail child into their home as a cherished foster son.
Because of his delicacy, John was kept out of school for a year and allowed to become acquainted with his new guardians and their extravagant household. Thomas Hancock’s granite-faced mansion had been built to the plans of a London architect, with graceful black chimneys, a sloping tiled roof and fifty-four windows. Thomas Hancock ran four trading ships and instructed his captains to bring back luxurious furnishings—damasks, exotic plants, English wallpaper patterned with peacocks. From England had also come a black walnut clock that stood ten feet tall. For his gardens, Hancock imported peach and apricot trees from Bilbao, yews and holly from a London horticulturist. The holly vines arrived dead and some of the alien flower seeds never bloomed, but the five thousand pounds sterling that Hancock had spent on his house and grounds had produced a Boston showplace.
Thomas Hancock and his wife took an equal pride in their attractive foster child. At eight, John entered the Public Latin School, where the last hour of each day was devoted to a class in penmanship. At thirteen, he was enrolled at Harvard College. There he rose at 6 A.M. for chapel services and afterward a breakfast of biscuits, coffee and beer. At noon the students poured themselves drafts of cider from two pewter mugs set out amid the meat and vegetables. That indulgence toward alcohol, combined with the severe New England winters, bred habits that lasted a lifetime. When he became master of his uncle’s house, John Hancock kept a gallon jug of hot rum punch on his sideboard day and night.
He had entered the Harvard class of 1754 ranked fifth among his classmates, which assured him better chambers, a front pew at chapel and first choice of food at the head table in the commons. But Hancock was demoted four notches when he and another boy engaged in the undergraduate sport of getting a Negro slave drunk; the college authorities said they had endangered the slave’s life. Hancock’s rank had been restored by the time he sailed out into the world, a slender young man who favored lavender suits when he went riding in a family carriage always painted yellow. The Hancock rigs, however expensive, could never be quite sleek enough to be fashionable. Ordering a new carriage from London, Thomas Hancock explained the problem: “You know, Mrs. Hancock is none of the shortest and smallest of folks, though I’d prefer as light a one as possible to her size.”
Thomas Hancock sent his ward to Europe for a final polishing, and John was visiting London in the fall of 1760 when George III was installed as king. John Hancock was dazzled by the coronation ceremonies. Presented at court, he received from his sovereign—who was one year younger—the snuffbox he took back to Boston.
Returning home, Hancock set about learning his uncle’s business. How Thomas Hancock had become rich so quickly had always puzzled some Bostonians. When he was not quite fourteen, Thomas had been apprenticed to a bookbinder in Cornhill Street. He stayed there for seven years and then opened his own bookshop in Ann Street. Within two years he was investing his profits in a load of goods bound for Albany, and that led naturally to importing—cloth, tea, books. But those small profits didn’t explain how he had gone from apprentice to merchant in less than a decade. Thomas Hutchinson had heard a story that during those first years in trade Hancock had bought a diamond cheaply and sold it at a vast profit. But Hutchinson knew that the truth was more prosaic. Thomas Hancock was a smuggler.
His smuggling would have been unremarkable except for the scale on which he operated. To cut his risk, he took only temporary partners. With them he sent his ships with legal cargo to Surinam in Dutch Guiana and they returned with South American contraband. Hancock dealt in coarse cloth, ribbons, buckles, fans, all merchandise that could enter the colony legally only through Britain. He also dealt in hardware, pins, coal. And tea. From his own expertise, Hutchinson knew that Hancock bought cargoes of tea at St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies and shipped it to Boston in hogsheads marked as molasses. He also imported a few chests of tea from England to act as a cover for the smuggled barrels.
John Hancock began by waiting on customers at the store on the family pier, Hancock’s Wharf. When his uncle died of apoplexy in 1764, everyone agreed that John had proved himself qualified to take over the empire. But they were curious how he would handle his new riches, some seventy thousand pounds or more. For the first months after his mourning, John became a busy host, caught up in a round of parties and balls. He was the most eligible bachelor in New England. But when someone claimed him, it was not a Boston merchant’s daughter for marriage but Samuel Adams for politics.
On the day of Hancock’s election to the House, John Adams was walking on the Common when he ran into his cousin. They had taken a few turns around the green when they came into view of the mansion that Hancock had inherited two years earlier. Pointing up at its stone façade, Samuel Adams remarked, “This town has done a wise thing today.”
“What?” asked John Adams.
“They have made that young man’s fortune their own.”
—
Samuel Adams was fifteen years older than John Hancock, and these days he was looking o
lder still. On both sides of the Atlantic the strain of the past year had told on many of the chief figures. King George was said to be unstable. Pitt’s enemies claimed that his gout had moved to the brain. James Otis drank too much and raved on both sides of every issue. Thomas Hutchinson, perhaps warned by his father’s example, had undertaken a strict regimen of diet and exercise. John Hancock, never robust, was sending to London for a variety of remedies. And Samuel Adams suffered from a perpetual tremor, sometimes so severe that he could barely write because of the way his pen careened around the page.
Dorothy Quincy Hancock
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
And yet the mass of men remained tranquil. In his diary John Adams wrote that the repeal of the Stamp Act had hushed the popular clamor into silence. The Sons of Liberty seemed ready to disband. Governor Bernard spent much of the rest of 1766 trying to win compensation for Thomas Hutchinson and others who had suffered from the riots. But leaders in the House wanted to tie any payment to an amnesty for those men who had been arrested. James Otis had persuaded the House to open a gallery for visitors, and for the first time in Massachusetts history those debates would be public.
Hutchinson was apprehensive when he heard himself described once again on the House floor as an unscrupulous man who lusted for power. He guessed that the charges were being repeated all over the colony. But he and Bernard were willing to accept the abuse—and agree to the amnesty—in order to get the reparations. Hutchinson had claimed losses of twenty-five hundred pounds sterling. An independent audit put the figure about seven hundred pounds higher, and the colony agreed to reimburse him. The riot’s leaders who had been set free from Sheriff Greenleaf’s jail had been lying low for months, but now they were walking boldly through the streets. Their amnesty prompted England to refuse the terms; by that time, however, Hutchinson had already been paid. Officially, the affair was ended.
But Samuel Adams and his dwindling band were determined that Boston remember the protests. On August 16, 1766, one year after the effigies appeared on the Liberty Tree, the Sons of Liberty staged an anniversary dinner under its branches. While the town’s leading patriots toasted the king and Pitt, young apprentices and black seamen massed in the street and shouted the old slogans. The Tories continued to regard those men as rabble and scum, but Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty were impressing on them that they had shared in one of Boston’s brightest moments.
—
When they opposed the Stamp Act, Lord Rockingham and Benjamin Franklin had unwittingly misled Parliament about the nature of the American protests. That was why, barely one year after the rioting, the king’s ministers could provide Samuel Adams for the second time with the inflammatory issue he had been lacking. Adams’ chief antagonist was another official trying to ease Britain’s debts, but Charles Townshend was no humorless accountant like George Grenville. His rollicking speeches in the Commons usually came after a long and festive supper, and they had won Townshend the nickname “Champagne Charley.” William Pitt—now Lord Chatham—considered Townshend a weak leader and was determined to see him gone. To prove himself, Townshend turned again to the idea of an American tax. But this time he would hold the colonists to their word. They had claimed that they objected only to taxes on their internal affairs. Townshend found that distinction ridiculous, but he would respect it. Fighting for his political life, he assured the Parliament that he knew “the mode by which a revenue may be drawn from America without offense.” Few men in the Commons knew the Americans well enough to tell him that by the year 1767 that mode didn’t exist.
Townshend proposed imposing external duties, those collected at the ports, on several of the commodities that Americans were required by law to import exclusively from England—paint, paper, lead and tea. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, was ailing again, but, alarmed by this new provocation, he called on George III and persuaded him to dismiss Townshend from the Exchequer. When the king cast about for a replacement, however, he could find none, and it was Chatham who left the government.
An effective propaganda campaign in London by the American Tories helped Townshend win support in Parliament. Governor Bernard, Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver had been supplying their British friends with inflammatory articles from the Boston Gazette, especially those about the amnesty for the Stamp Act rioters. Down the coast, New Yorkers had begun to balk at paying part of the expense for quartering British troops there, and the Massachusetts House was congratulating New York on that insubordination.
In that climate, Townshend’s duties won passage easily. He could also earmark a portion of the new revenue to pay royal appointees for serving in America. For years, the patriots had thought that their only control over a haughty governor or judge was the fact that their legislature paid his salary. Townshend was removing that leverage. And to guarantee that the duties raised as much money as he had promised to Parliament, he was tightening control over America’s slack customs procedures. Townshend appointed five new commissioners of customs and sent them to Boston with broad powers. Since colonial jurors rarely convicted a local merchant of smuggling, Townshend’s acts set up new admiralty courts that could try smugglers without a jury. And the acts made it easier for customs officials to obtain writs of assistance.
In approving the Townshend Acts, Parliament was ignoring the way the Americans viewed their customs system. Rockingham’s Ministry had listened to the colonies and cut the duties on molasses from threepence a gallon to one penny; since the old bribe and the new tax were identical, traders had lost any incentive to pay off the customs officials. But the veteran customs men London was sending to Boston would know even more lucrative ways to exploit their position. The punishment for violating the Sugar Act was seizure of a ship and its smuggled cargo. At customs, the trick was to pretend to be lax and then crack down abruptly and catch the merchants with large stores of contraband. In London, that increase in confiscated goods might look as though honest officials were finally doing their job. In Boston, shipowners and retailers knew the tactic was extortion.
This time when Samuel Adams sounded the alarm, he could expect a reaction from his province. He argued that Townshend’s relatively small duties would soon give way to larger ones. They would be followed by British soldiers to enforce the law and strip America’s legislatures of their power. Adams knew, though, that abstract predictions aroused less fear and resentment than pointing out specific men with royal titles. These new commissioners of customs, he wrote, were “the greatest political curses that could have been sent amongst us.” Adams proposed a fitting reception for them. As it happened, the commissioners would be landing in Boston on Pope’s Day. They should be taken into custody by Mackintosh’s irregulars, marched to the Liberty Tree and shown the wisdom of resigning their commissions immediately.
Once again, Adams was more militant than his allies. James Otis was among the patriots who weren’t willing to treat British representatives of the king as roughly as they had handled a fellow American like Andrew Oliver. In a long harangue at the Town Meeting, Otis upheld the king’s right to appoint as many customs officials as he pleased. As for threats or riots, Otis said that “to insult and tear each other in pieces was to act like madmen.”
The Pope’s Day parade went off on schedule on November 5, 1767, and the commissioners entered Boston without incident. The head of this new board, Henry Hulton, even paused with the crowd to join in laughing at the figures of the Pope and twenty demons as they were carried past. Whatever his disappointment, Samuel Adams was a tactician. Today he was advising the patriots that not a hair of the commissioners should be touched. But he added, “The time is coming when they shall lick the dust and melt away.”
For now, Adams would keep his forces leashed until the moment when all of Boston approved the next attack.
—
Three years had passed since the shortages in Samuel Adams’ tax collecting had first been revealed, and during that time the Tories had come to hate and fear
him. One conservative artist said that if wanted to draw the devil, he would get Sam Adams to sit for him. But, as Peter Oliver complained, Adams had ingratiated himself so shrewdly with the vulgar classes that he seemed invulnerable. All the same, the Tory press kept up its assault. One article called Samuel Adams a cur-dog—“very artful, loves babbling, especially when he gets into a very large room; has been taught to run into houses, to pick up money and run away with it directly to his kennel.”
By March 1767, Bostonians had become enough disturbed about the tax deficits to examine the books of its five collectors. The other four men were also found to have money outstanding, but Samuel Adams’ debts were three times the average. He owed a total of four thousand pounds. Thomas Hutchinson called that debt a “defalcation,” and it would have meant public ruin for a less resourceful man. But, as the Tories watched in outrage, John Hancock rode in to save Adams by expanding his political patronage and guaranteeing control of the Town Meeting. As Peter Oliver put it, Hancock was already “as closely attached to the hindermost part of Mr. Adams as the rattles are affixed to the tail of the rattle snake.”
After delays and lawsuits, the Town Meeting forgave much of Adams’ debt and transferred the remainder to another man to collect. At last, Samuel Adams was free from a persistent embarrassment. “His power over weak minds,” said Peter Oliver, “was truly surprising.”
—
In May 1768, six months after the customs commissioners arrived from England, John Hancock’s sloop the Liberty entered Boston Harbor with a cargo of wine from Madeira. Her captain told the customs men that the wine on board totaled twenty-five pipes, or casks, which was slightly over three thousand gallons but well below the ship’s capacity. A month later, Thomas Kirk, the investigator charged with verifying the report, came forward to claim that during his inspection he had been shoved into a cabin and nailed inside by a gang of men led by another of Hancock’s captains, John Marshall. While Kirk was held captive, other workers removed the stores of undeclared wine. When they were finished, Captain Marshall warned Kirk that his life and property depended on his silence. Now he was ignoring the threat and accusing Boston’s wealthiest merchant of violating the Townshend Acts. Captain Marshall couldn’t refute the story, since he had died, apparently of a heart attack, the day after the Liberty was unloaded.
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